were travelling at a rapid pace on the high-road to fortune.
Gilbert Fenton sat in the inner office at noon one day about a week after his return from Lidford.

He had come to business early that morning, had initialed a good many accounts, and written half-a-dozen letters already, and had thrown himself back in his easy-chair for a few minutes' idle musing--musing upon that one sweet dream of his new existence, of course.
From whatever point his thoughts started, they always drifted into that channel.
While he was sitting like this, with his hands in his pockets and his chair tilted upon its hind legs, the half-glass door opened, and a gentleman came into the office--a man a little over middle height, broad-shouldered, and powerfully built, with a naturally dark complexion, which had been tanned still darker by sun and wind, black eyes and heavy black eyebrows, a head a little bald at the top, and a face that might have been called almost ugly but for the look of intellectual power in the broad open forehead and the perfect modelling of the flexible sensitive mouth; a remarkable face altogether, not easily to be forgotten by those who had once looked upon it.
This man was John Saltram, the one intimate and chosen friend of Gilbert Fenton's youth and manhood.

They had met first at Oxford, and had seldom lost sight of each other since the old university days.

They had travelled a good deal together during the one idle year that had preceded Gilbert's sudden plunge into commerce.

They had been up the Nile together in the course of these wanderings; and here, remote from all civilized aid, Gilbert had fallen ill of a fever--a long tedious business which brought him to the very point of death, and throughout which John Saltram had nursed him with a womanly tenderness and devotion that knew no abatement.